{Open} Screw Drivin'

[Keola Williams]

Worn wooden boxes balanced precariously in his arms, Keola nudged the constantly-ajar door to the commons of 217. He had lost the boxes branded with foriegn names of wineries and vintages coming up the stairs several times and felt relief upon setting them down next to the half dozen others on the finished oak of the dorm floor. The paint-stained boy still cloudy on paint fumes shook out his arms and wiggled a bit before unlatching the false front of the filing cabinet in which they kept the contraband. On the shelf below the panini grill and above the elaborate hookah his cousin had crafted Keola had stashed the tools he pilfered from the wood shop. He stood on the pads of his feet as he held the level up to the faint pencil lines he had sketched on the wall opposite the window nook, to the left of their outside door.

[Zoe Carlisle.]

Several creaking noises roused Zoe from her bedroom, where the young lady appeared to be preparing for some strange combination between sleep and dance practice. "Jezebel" by Iron and Wine was already drifting out of the stereo in her room, a telltale sign that the girl had been about to resume her studies from the class she'd no doubt recently arrived home from. After all, it was monday.

It wasn't unusual for Keola to wander in from somewhere to find Zoe poised at the portable ballet bar set up in the common area outside their bedroom doors, eyeing herself painstakingly in the several mirrors she'd hung next to it specifically for that purpose.

Now, however, the young lady had not yet started, and instead padded out of their bedroom in an odd combination of half-tied toe shoes, black tights and leg-warmers (It was October, and the poor old heater in Croatoan didn't usually kick in until some time around January), a pair of tiny stiped green, blue and white booty shorts meant for sleeping in, and a black camisole. Her hair was still in it's bun from ballet class, giving away the fact that, yes, she had probably arrived home from the school of dance in downtown Roanoke, taken a short snack-and-homework break, and was now ready to start up again, nevermind that her perfectionist behaviour regarding ballet was the very reason she wasn't allowed to dance five days a week.

"Whats in the crates?" asked the petite girl curiously, perching a toe on top of the filing cabinet and leaning into it. Her pretty head rested upon her knee as she gazed earnestly at her roommate for a few seconds, before her little nose wrinkled and she abandoned the stretch and walked a few steps back, declaring "You stink!"

[Keola Williams]

Keola turned from his leveling to his muddled roomie as she casually contorted. He was used to conversations held through fourth and fifth and had come to a cursory understanding of the French whispered while he read, cooked, and brushed his teeth.

"They're empty," he said after a moment of contemplating how to best work in French films and tortured grapes into his response. "Except for...." he bent and removed the loose slat lids of several of the boxes, "This one." He paused over the only box not stained cherry-wood red, in which a few bottles of white wine lay closely wood shavings.

Keola grinned as she stepped back. "Thirteen different people tried to get high off my shirt at dinner."

[Zoe Carlisle.]

As Keola mentioned dinner, Zoe realized with a start that she hadn't made it down to the cafeteria, and had instead been snacking on the reduced-fat wheat thins and carton of milk contained in their mini-fridge.

Peering into the crate of wine, Zoe smiled, pleased, and murmered "White wine is my favourite kind." She turned her attention to the bar and said over her shoulder, one arm arching gracefully over her head, "maybe we can have a dinner party avec brie et les crackers."

Another thing Keola, no doubt, was well-adjusted to was the fact that her thoughts often spilled out in a curious combination of French and English, a side effect of having spoken the language for two years straight and during most of her summers.

In turn, Zoe was used to Keola's many craft projects--this one, for instance, and to his late-night bicyclings, the fact that he sometimes spoke... polynesian or pidgin, or whatever they spoke in Hawaii.

"Why do we have a lot of empty crates?"

[Keola Williams]

Upon locating the treasure chest among the empties Keola excavated the merlot and made room in the filing cabinet.

"I'll start enjoying brie when you try spam musubi," Keola said, refering to the meat-product sushi he rolled when he felt homesick. Other products of nostalgia included the carefully cultivated orchids that smell like cocoa, which he emptied some of the wine-crate wood shavings into, and the pidgin he slipped into during breif cross-country and Pacific conversations with his kupuna.

Keola motioned to the pile of books, found art and ominous lone knitting needles, sticking straight up out of the mess, that had started accumulating next to the couch. "I thought we needed more shelves. I hunted liquor stores until the drive-through on Hemingway let me rummage around storage for the crates they ship wine in."

[Zoe Carlisle.]

At the mention of the dreaded spam sushi, one of the few topics of discussion they disagreed severely upon, Zoe made a horrible face, bending over her touch her nose to her knees as she said "In your dreams. There is something inherently wrong with that concept. Brie, however, is carefully cultivated, creamy, flavorful, and really good with tomato and crackers." She popped up from her pose and switched directions rapidly, as though signalling that the aforementioned statements were her final words on that subject.

As she listened to the rest of what her roommate had to say, however, an affectionate smile crept to the girls face. "I love living with you! Is this going to involve actually carpentry, or are we just going to stack them...?" She asked, abandoning her activity and padding over to the couch, blue eyes sweeping across the room.

The couch faced an old television and VCR sitting on top of a milk crate, and the wall next to their bedrooms was lined with several bookshelves, all of them filled to the brim with assortments of books. Strictly speaking, the shelves to the left were Zoe's, to the right Keolas, but lots of borrowing and jostling had mixed them up somewhat, and Moliere was often found consorting with The Hitchhikers Guide, etc.

[Keola Williams]

A playful look of skepticism and disgust crossed Keolas face as he gave the dancer a wide berth; he had all too often wandered sleepily from his bedroom to be smacked in the face by a graceful hand, and returned to the boxes and accoutrements strewn on the floor.

"Power tools and everything," the boy said, fishing out the stolen screw driver and reving it as it rested on his shoulder. "Do you have a hard hat or desire to listen to talk radio handy?"

Keola picked up one of the rectangular boxes and held its base to the wall at his chest, one side to the perpindicular wall and the bottom align with the lowest of the three faint pencil lines parallel to the ground. "We could put two at this level, with one above that and another two at the top. The negative space could be used that way... if you ever want to start collecting commerative plates."

He looked to his room mate with a sense of apprehension growing out of the impulsiveness of his actions. It was last night while Zoe was at her studio that the idea had struck him and he began his quest, an underaged boy on his bike cycling from liquor store to liquor store into the early hours of the morning.

[Zoe Carlisle.]

"Talk radio, yeah... I can dig it, are you sure we're allowed to drill in the wall?" Zoe's famous concern over rule-breaking, characteristic of someone who had been labelled long ago an overachiever, took precedence over every witty comment she had stored up about commemorative plates.

Zoe narrowed her eyes at the space on the wall, tilting her head comically as the arrangement her roommate described fell into place. Despite the fact that Keola's project may have been illegal, the charm of the proposed shelves was undeniable.